El corazón de Ester

Piece by the Málaga-born director and performer Alberto Cortés, which reconstructs, from a nineteenth-century manuscript, the story of a woman who gives herself up for love until she disappears. It is presented as part of the Festival de Otoño.

The starting point is a story set in the nineteenth century: the discovery of a manuscript signed by Ester, a young woman of intense religious fervour. Drawing on her diaries and love poems, the production reconstructs the life of a woman who gives herself entirely to her loved ones until she fades away without leaving a trace.

Cortés presents the performance as an open confession before the audience, a kind of ritual in which he himself exposes his body. Starting from this story, the piece reflects on emotional dependence, on the pressure exerted by the gaze of others and on the idea of being sold again and again in a system that turns the body and intimacy into merchandise. On stage they are joined by the guitar of Adriano Galante and the vocal group proyectoe Le.

The show rests on the word and on poetry, with references to Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson, the Brontë sisters, María Zambrano or Anne Carson, and it sits within the line of the author's earlier work.